The Altruist ended with an appeal. The cultured must return to the People, and the People must realize that in doing this the upper classes have no sense of superiority, and are actuated by motives of purest Christian love.
Our host was leaning back in his chair, and his face wore a happy smile.
A Trades Unionist, in responding to the two preceding orators, said that it did him good all over to hear remarks like theirs. They expressed his sentiments exactly. If more folks felt that way, there wouldn’t be all this trouble between labour and capital. The working-people were going to have their rights, and if these were not given, they would fight for them. But the working-man was quite willing to meet the capitalist half way and settle things peacefully if it could be done.
The young Socialist smiled at this militant formulation of the principle of brotherly love, but the Altruist did not hear. He rarely listened to what other people said.
I fell into a fit of abstraction and caught only fragments of the two next speeches. I knew, in a dim fashion, that the Populist had the floor, and was insisting that the one way to achieve universal good was by adopting the platform of his political party. I knew that the Temperance woman, who was sweet-faced and young, rose to say sternly that we were all wrong. Only by wakening the moral forces could the race be saved. For a world given over to passion there was no economic salvation.
Watching these burdened, anxious faces in the brilliant electric light, I wondered how I could have lived nine and thirty years without knowing that this old earth, which I loved, was so very bad. Three months ago I had seen only here and there a thistle or a bramble bush in its fair fields. Now it looked to me all weeds and tares, weeds and tares.
But the Professor was responding to the toast: “The University and the People.”
“There is no gulf between the University and the People,” he said in a quick, emphatic voice. He had a perplexed air, as if wondering why he had come.
“The University was founded by the People, for the People. Its interests are the interests of the People. In its hands lies one of the highest powers in a nation’s life. Economic conditions, moral forces, are naught without the intellectual guidance that comes through the trained minds of a country’s devoted servants, her scholars.”
These remarks were sufficiently noncommittal, yet the Professor was troubled, fearing that he had not said the right thing.